Her lips trembled and her gaze widened with tears.
"He went to find me?
And I missed him! Oh, Gerty, he tried to help me.
He told me--he warned me long ago--he foresaw that I should grow hateful to myself!" The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened the springs of self-pity in her friend's dry breast, and tear by tear Lily poured out the measure of her anguish.

She had dropped sideways in Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat.

Ah, it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily's part to rob her of her dream! To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily, as renunciation and service are the lot of those they despoil.

But if Selden's infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his name produced shook Gerty's steadfastness with a last pang.

Men pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the probation subduing the heart to human joys.